In the latest episode of the Senate Minority Leader embarrassing himself, Chuck Schumer reportedly called President Donald Trump and asked him to nominate Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court “as a way to unify the country.” Schumer, seemingly waking from a decades-long slumber to pontificate on 2018 politics, warned that there would be “cataclysmic” consequences of another arch conservative hostile to the Affordable Care Act and Roe v. Wade and that it would tear the country apart—an almost hilariously senseless non-appeal to Trump’s most basic political instincts.

The Twitter account for the Senate Committee of Mitch McConnell—who long ago napalmed any appearance of unity by blocking President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland—responded to Schumer’s appeal with a GIF of Michael Jordan laughing. Meanwhile, Trump nominated hardcore conservative federal appeals court judge Brett Kavanaugh, vetted by Leonard Leo of the right-wing law activist group, the Federalist Society.

In the face of naked Republican obstructionism and right-wing radicalism, Schumer has cluelessly leveraged his leadership position to new heights of fecklessness. In May, he tried to pin high gas prices on Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran deal, setting up a photo op in front of a gas station before Memorial Day weekend, that roused exactly zero voters. In late June, he took to the Senate floor to admonish fellow Democrat and California Rep. Maxine Waters as “not American” after she made a speech telling an enthusiastic crowd to “push back on” the Trump administration for its brutish policy of separating migrant children from parents at the border. “We all have to remember to treat our fellow Americans with the kind of civility and respect we expect afforded to us,” he lectured.

Despite Schumer’s 40+ years in public service, he seems fundamentally impaired in grasping the current political climate and the decades-long Republican project of stomping on Democrat pleas for unity. He certainly has not been alone. In 2000, when the Supreme Court stole the presidential election from Al Gore, Gore threw up his hands, preached "unity" and "acceptance" and made a call "to heal the divisions." And after graciousness in defeat, was it returned by Bush? Of course not. Post 9/11 he told anti-war dissenters, "baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will," leading to the shunning of war critics and accusations of being unpatriotic. Gore should have known better. He was there during President Bill Clinton's triangulation years when Newt Gingrich put out his famous 133-word memo on messaging in 1990, detailing the words Republicans should use to define Democrats: sick, traitor, corrupt, and liberal, among them. It came to define the Republican playbook: character assassination and obstructionism, whatever the issue. Democrats have responded by absorbing and capitulating to Republicans’ twisted version of asymmetrical reality—one that demanded their own civility in the face of ever-mounting viciousness—backing themselves into an ever-smaller corner until those like Schumer have lowered themselves into a cowering crouch, whispering unity and civility to anyone who will listen. Old Democrats have been bringing a tea cup to a bar brawl because that bar was once a nice, civilized cafe, a real community center, 30 years ago—and they're scolding other Democrats for not holding their pinky fingers up when a bar stool flies across the joint.

When Obama was elected in 2008, he accepted with a speech emphasizing “the belief that while each of us will pursue our own individual dreams, we are an American family and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people.” The Republican response? “We’re going to kick the hell out of him all the time,” future Vice President Mike Pence said. “We’re going to go through him like crap through a goose!” In pursuing a healthcare fix, Obama proffered a plan he thought might appeal to Republicans, and then nominated a moderate, Merrick Garland, to the Supreme Court. Instead of accepting an olive branch, Republicans promptly lit it on fire, adopting a stance against anything Obama was for, unity and country be damned, and earning them the moniker of “The Party of No.” Increasingly radical, Republicans across the political establishment were so unified in absolute opposition that they cast George W. Bush’s old speechwriter David Frum into the wilderness for arguing that they work with Obama on healthcare, which got him fired from conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. Along the way, they won back the House, the Senate, and the White House, along with two Supreme Court appointments and unleashed a frenzied tribal base whipped up by the newer iterations of Gingrich’s stylings in untethered character assassination—all on the message of enmity over unity and cynicism over hope.

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Despite the widespread and successful Republican campaign of gerrymandering and voter suppression, Democrats have a chance to retake political power. Catalyzed by the historic Women’s March, the rise of #MeToo, and a president who has been accused by at least 19 women of sexual harassment, a record number of women are running for office. Politico counts at least 575 women who’ve declared running for the House, the Senate, or governor—almost 75 percent of which are Democrats—which doesn’t even account for state and local races. And following this year’s Women’s March in January, there has been an outpouring of newly invigorated mass activism on left-leaning issues, like gun control, science, and immigration: March for Our Lives in March, March for Science in April, and Keep Families Together in June. Protests have broken out at airports, blocked buses transferring migrant children separated from their parents, and temporarily shut down the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Portland, OR and elsewhere. More than 100 Microsoft employees protested the software company’s work with ICE, and alumni from Kirstjen Nielsen’s Tampa prep school signed an open letter condemning her enforcement of the family separation policy. Alas, in a time when Democrat enthusiasm is on fire, Schumer and fellow Democratic leaders have fashioned themselves as wet blankets.

In regards to Waters’s speech, Democrat leaders could have taken the tact of Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York when asked about it on CNN, keeping the conversation focused on the inhumane child separation policy: "To get sidetracked into these debates about whether or not somebody was welcome at a restaurant takes our eyes off of what's going on in America today." Instead Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also took a swipe at Waters, tweeting that her response to Trump’s “incivility” was “unacceptable.” For Schumer and Pelosi’s efforts at maintaining civility, Trump vilified Pelosi, and returned to an insulting refrain on Waters, pronouncing that she had a “very low IQ,” and gave her an ominous warning, “be careful what you wish for, Max.” Waters had called for protest, not physical violence, but the bipartisan distortion of her words unleashed a torrent of abuse, including “a very serious death threat,” which forced her to cancel two events. While the party of Trump has stood by when Montana Congressional candidate Greg Gianforte physically assaulted a reporter, accused pedophile Roy Moore angled for the Alabama Senate seat, and Trump, himself, has made explicit calls for violence at rallies, Democrats have taken to over-policing members of their own party for the mildest of comments, simultaneously failing to make inroads with intractable Trump voters while angering their own base.

"Old Democrats have been bringing a tea cup to a bar brawl because that bar was once a nice, civilized cafe, a real community center, 30 years ago—and they're scolding other Democrats for not holding their pinky fingers up when a bar stool flies across the joint."

In the wake of Pelosi and Schumer’s public scolding of Waters, nearly 200 black female leaders and supporters signed a letter last week demanding an apology from them to Waters for failing to protect her from “unwarranted attacks” from the GOP. “That failure was further compounded by your decision to unfairly deride her as being ‘uncivil’ and ‘un-American,’” it read. “This mischaracterizes her call to action for peaceful democratic assembly and the exercise of her constitutional rights to free speech in support of defenseless immigrant children and their families.”

In the same exact week that she angered many black women—a core of the Democratic coalition—Pelosi also managed to enrage younger leftists, downplaying rising star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning defeat of 10-term incumbent Rep. Joseph Crowley in a Democratic New York primary. “They made a choice in one district,” Pelosi said in an interview, after putting out a statement profusely praising Crowley. Ocasio-Cortez, who ran on a platform of “moral clarity” and specific policy proposals like Medicare-for-all, proved so galvanizing she also won the primary of the neighboring Bronx district, where she wasn’t even running, by write-in, and sparked a rush on the Stila “Stay all Day” in Beso, which sold out on several sites after she named the lipstick. Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth also denigrated Ocasio-Cortez’s upset. “I don’t think you can go too far to the left and still win the Midwest,” she said, inflaming an intraparty spat between establishment Democrats and a rising tide of bold-thinking leftists. Ocasio-Cortez quickly retorted. “With respect to the Senator, strong, clear advocacy for working class Americans isn’t just for the Bronx,” she said, listing the Midwest states Bernie Sanders had won over Hillary Clinton in the primaries. “We then lost several of those states in the general. What’s the plan to prevent a repeat?”

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The Democratic leadership has taken the position that the problem is not their leadership, but their base. This despite the fact that under their civil, centrist, and careful stewardship, the Democratic party bled out 1,000 seats nationally over the past 10 years—in part because the party long ago stopped offering more bold solutions needed for their working class base in a country where 40 percent of Americans can’t cover a $400 emergency and student loan debt just hit $1.5 trillion. Some of this was, in part, due to successful GOP efforts in voter suppression, but the larger Democratic establishment, in the form of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), has proven woefully inept at recruiting and supporting candidates that turn out local voters. In a series called the Battle of Woodstock for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi detailed the national Democratic incompetence with one race in Woodstock, the New York 19th, in which candidates reported that the DCCC evaluates their viability by a single metric—the ability to raise gobs of money—and pushes them to spend all their time with donors, not campaigning. It’s effectively a reprisal of the 2016 presidential campaign when Hillary Clinton swung through California for million-dollar fundraisers while ignoring local organizers in Michigan and Wisconsin begging her to visit those states. Just as the DNC tried to squelch the Sanders campaign, the DCCC has intervened in local primaries, even performing opposition research on progressive candidates, attempting to exert a safe, generic template on every single region instead of letting voters shake out which ideas resonate.

Democrats forget that they can bend public opinion towards moral clarity and big ideas, with projects like the New Deal, gay marriage, and voting rights. Today, a phalanx of careful Democrats lose their shit anytime a single candidate dares to offer solutions that meet the severity of the challenges facing America today—a reflex that has been losing elections all over the country. Following the lead of the Pelosis and Schumers, pundits are also fiercely swatting at any hint of resoluteness, like The New York Times’ Frank Bruni, who just argued that “The Center is Sexier Than You Think,” and Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar, who argued for passive acceptance of his former student—“A Liberal’s Case for Brett Kavanaugh”—also in the pages of The New York Times. “Enough about the Democratic Socialists of America,” mewed Bruni about Ocasio-Cortez, citing more centrist candidates who won their respective primaries. Republicans have achieved increasingly radical policy and legal goals, but Bruni found Ocasio-Cortez’s platform of affordable healthcare, jobs, and student loan forgiveness—one that even comedian, MMA expert, and noted Intellectual Dark Web member Joe Rogan recently praised on his podcast—a bridge too far. Conservatives have been tip-toeing around the white-nationalist sections of their base, but liberals don’t spare a second thought to alienating those arguing for a new New Deal—or moving the dial on how we legislate and enforce immigration policies.

As major right-wing donors have coalesced around truly radical and unpopular ideas, funding voter suppression and ultra conservative judges, with dark money groups like The Federalist Society and Donors Trust, effectively institutionalizing far-out-of-the-mainstream policies, Democratic donors have set their sights on maintaining nice conversations. Liberal donor and Hyatt heiress Rachel Pritzker and strategist Mike Berkowitz of Third Plateau, as relayed by Yascha Mouk in Slate, have prioritized tempering polarization and initiating cross-partisan dialogue with meetings of Patriots and Pragmatists. By 2040, as populations concentrate in urban areas for work and empty out of more rural states, demographers expect that 30 percent of Americans will control 70 votes in the Senate, thanks to the Electoral College. By then, we may not have abortion rights, collective bargaining rights, or any shred of protection from predatory lenders, but at least liberal donors and strategists like Pritzker, Berkowitz, and Mouk can still raise their pinkies and a glass of Blanc de Blanc with Never Trumpers. Bruni and Amar might even get an invite.

Today, 59 percent of all Americans support a Medicare-for-all plan, 57 percent support abortion in all or most cases, and 46 percent support a federal jobs guarantee. Yet Democratic leaders are running scared from popular, practical solutions and inspiring new members of their own party in the face of an overtly and increasingly vulgar, radical, and racist Republican party. What, exactly, are they afraid of?

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